From Bottom to Top : Schuelkes Know Lake Tahoe’s Depths and the Mackinaw That Live There

HOMEWOOD, Calif. —  There are years of fishing experience on board the Kingfish as it purrs out onto Lake Tahoe in the pre-dawn calm, but that does not deter Pam Schuelke from delivering her standard lecture.

“Most people have never fished this way before,” she tells her dozen clients, most of whom are outdoor writers. “And even if they have fished here with another guide, they haven’t fished the way we do.”

So, Schuelke is saying, listen up. Some of these experts have never fished for mackinaw, nor have they fished with a female guide--and they haven’t been ordered around at 5 a.m. since they were in the Army.

“Everybody has their own space on the bottom (of the lake)--if everybody’s on the bottom,” Schuelke says, loud and clear. “If you haven’t learned properly and you’re not on the bottom, you’re going to tangle everybody else on the boat.”

Schuelke and her husband, Larry, run their 43-foot boat out of Homewood, on the northwest shore of Tahoe, always targeting mackinaw, 250 days a year.

“Summer fishing is slower,” Schuelke says. “Winter fishing is phenomenal.”

That’s when, with business slower, she runs the boat alone, while Larry goes off to lead snowmobile tours. The cold doesn’t seem to bother Pam. Most of the anglers are wearing jackets over sweat shirts against the morning chill. Pam is in a short-sleeved shirt.

“My grandmother is Aleut Indian,” she says. “She grew up in Kodiak. That’s why I never get cold.”

She seems a kindred spirit to the mackinaw, who like their water cold--40 degrees at 200 feet where she fishes for them. The California Department of Fish and Game has taken them from as deep as 1,100 feet in Tahoe, which goes to 1,645 feet but never freezes and, legend says, whose frigid depths hold the bodies of drowning victims forever.

In his book “Freshwater Fishes of California,” Samuel M. McGinnis describes mackinaw fishing as “the closest thing to deep sea fishing in inland California.” The mackinaw live so deep that when they are brought to the surface, their bellies often are uncomfortably bloated by the reduced density. Schuelke pokes them with a needle to let the air out.

“There, is that better?” she asks a fisherman.

Psssssss.

*

Mackinaw--scientific name Salvelinus namaycush-- are better known as lake trout, except in California and Nevada, which share the lake. They were brought to Tahoe from the Midwest in 1885 and have found their way into a few smaller lakes in the area. At Tahoe they first thrived on Paiute sculpin, and when the sculpin ran low, the DFG introduced mysis shrimp, which the mackinaw devour, but which are too small to be used for bait.

The best substitute is a minnow, which must remind the mackinaw of the sculpin, until they realize they’ve been had. Most Western anglers have never caught a mackinaw because they don’t know how. Pam Schuelke will tell them.

She has rigged two rods at one corner of the stern on downriggers--heavy-weighted lines with eight- pound sinkers that hold a fishing line deep until a fish hits, releasing a clip. Two more are on outriggers reaching 15 feet outside the boat, and the rest are hand-held with 70-pound-test wire line on open reels. Above the treble hooks are shiny spoons that look like bicycle fenders--big tackle for big fish.

“Never get any slack in that wire line or it’ll kink on you and it will break,” Schuelke warns. “So don’t do that. Always, always, always put your thumb on the line (when letting out line). Wire line backlashes are no fun.”

Having reduced the writers to novices, Schuelke tells them how to fish for mackinaw.

“The whole object of this wire line is to stay as close as you can to the bottom without dragging on it, so we’re going to use that sinker like a blind man uses his cane. Tap that bottom. You want to be within inches at all times, without dragging.

There is no (line) stretch, so it’s important to be extremely gentle.

“You will get lots of snags. As long as you don’t panic, snags are really easy (to jerk free). The bottom of this lake is very forgiving.”

It’s difficult for a novice to tell a snag from a bite, until the rod starts to pound. On the outside chance that should happen, Schuelke says: “No. 1: Don’t set the hook! They’re a very soft-mouthed fish. We are trolling wire, and if you set the hook you’re going to come up with a set of lips, which are really hard to barbecue.”

Elsewhere, most anglers wouldn’t think of barbecuing a lake trout, which are regarded as a borderline trash fish.

Schuelke says: “I’ve talked to people that have eaten these fish out of the Great Lakes and they say they’re terrible.”

Their meat is an unappetizing off-white and, said Ted Dzialo of the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wis., “when they get big they get a little mushy. But they’re good smoked.”

But mackinaw--a different name, a different treat.

“Wonderful,” Schuelke says. “They have pink meat and they’re real firm and delicate. A fish tastes like its environment. These fish, their main diet is shrimp, and the water they live in is 99.97% pure. What more could they ask for? Even our rainbows and browns, after they’ve been planted in this lake give them a couple, three seasons and their meat is like salmon--a bright, fluorescent red.”

But she seldom eats one.

“When you fish for ‘em all day every day and you’re handling ‘em and you smell like one all the time, the last thing you want to do is take one home and cook it. I’d rather have a steak.”

Larry drives the boat at a slow troll of less than 1 m.p.h. and watches the depth-finder while Pam charges around the deck, adjusting the depths of the outriggers, netting fish, baiting hooks and admonishing her students.

She tells one angler: “Cy, you’re doing too much yakking and not enough fishing. Pay attention--you’re dragging the bottom!”

She yells from the afterdeck, “How deep are you, Larry?”

“A hundred and ninety (feet),” he yells back from the wheelhouse.

“Slow down, Larry!”

Or, “Speed up, Larry!”

Larry seems to take it all in stride, as do her customers.

“That’s just Pam,” Larry says. “She’s the best on the lake.”

But she has learned it all since meeting Larry, when he was running a boat out of Port San Luis south of San Luis Obispo.

“She and her family came out fishing with me one day in 1980,” he says. “That’s how we met. She ended up being my galley cook that summer.”

Over the next two years, she worked up to deckhand and then to wife.

“We got tired of the ocean, so we came up here one winter just to snow-ski, thinking we’d go back to the ocean in the spring,” Larry says. “We fell in love with the area, so I got a job out of South Shore, running a boat. Pam got her license and ran another boat, then three years ago we decided we wanted to do it for ourselves.”

They bought the Kingfish, which equals Mickey Daniels’ Big Mack as the two largest fishing boats on the lake.

Although Pam says the fishing is slow this day, everyone catches at last one mackinaw, the largest a modest 28 inches.

“We’ve come in without fish five times,” Larry says. “Pam was the last fishing guide on this lake that could say she’d never been skunked.”

The mackinaw limit at Tahoe is two. The lake record is 37 pounds 6 ounces, caught by Robert Aronsen of South Lake Tahoe 19 years ago this week.

Pam urges customers to release catches larger than 10 pounds.

“I let ‘em know, ‘That fish has been swimming in this lake for 25 years. So he made one little mistake. Are you going to kill him?’

“Most people (agree). The smaller fish, in my opinion, it would be nice to get a bunch of those guys out of here and try to increase the size (of the others).”

It may happen. When Pam talks, people listen.

She admits: “I do get a little obnoxious at times. I’m very honest. But I don’t think too many people get offended, because they keep coming back. Some won’t come unless I’m on the boat. So I guess I’m not that bad.”